Royalty, raucousness and redemption

Last week the Fine Rooms at the Royal Academy were full to bursting with grandees . . . then suspiciously large men in grey suits . . . and then the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall. The celebrations marked the centenary of the Everyman's Library - some might cavil that a prince of the realm, or in fact very many of the assembled, cannot really be considered everymen, or women, but no matter. They were celebrating with champagne and polite, rather royal-distracted titters, at publisher David Campbell's jokes about booksellers (Dent apparently made a fortune buying books, binding them, then selling them back to the booksellers he got them from) and Casanova's memoirs (a one-volume version is forthcoming this year, introduced by John Julius Norwich). When Campbell announced that in 2006 Everyman would complete the Millennium Library gift of 300 titles, 1.7 million books, with a bookshop value of more than £19m, to every state secondary school in the UK, the prince said in a stage whisper to a woman - not Camilla - standing at his side, "Marvellous"! And that was that.

&middot A singularly different atmosphere - whooping, cheering, lots of laughter - and an entirely different demographic at the South Bank Centre, where Michael Smith, Chuck Klosterman and DBC Pierre were holding a reading. Or, in the case of Smith, a reading/musical performance, as the author of The Giro Playboy, a tale of dole-funded wanderings through London, Brighton and Essex, set his words adrift on the mood music of his collaborator, Flora. At times the music prevailed, at others it brought out the novel's internal rhyme-scheme, and "clotted cream Regency hotels dreamed of themselves". Klosterman was a discovery, as a gifted comic speaker if not necessarily as a writer; the litany of his past relationships as seen though the metaphor of the band KISS was not the most achieved prose passage ever written. DBC Pierre read Ludmila's Broken English, his as yet unpublished follow-up to Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little. His novel, about conjoined twins in search of a mail-order bride, began comic, but when he went to the Caucasus to see how close he'd got to reality he was so shocked by the hardship he saw that "I downgraded Ludmila's chances in life".

&middot Miranda Sawyer, moderating, and finding that locating themes that linked the three was like "putting cats in a bag", asked about their relationship to truth: "Pierre, you've been known to tell the odd lie" (a reference to his conman past). Klosterman observed his subtitle, "85% of a True Story" was very useful - though it was not, contrary to assumption, a reaction to the James Frey and TJ Leroy scandals; while Pierre averred that increasingly he discovered as he wrote that "plausibility" - the aim of conventional fiction - "seems untrue to me". They were asked about their experience of drugs, and about voice: Smith based his, he said, on his time working in pubs, listening to "old guys at two in the afternoon". And they were asked if writing saved them. Klosterman was having none of this - he did not write for the sake of it; "everything I write I want to be published and paid for" - but Smith and Pierre were more vulnerable. "Without writing I would have fallen apart," said Smith. "It was the only thing I could do." "Saved? Yeah, 100%," said Pierre. "Yeah, I collapsed, then recovered, then wrote. It's a compulsion and I would have exploded if I hadn't done this. And then if it pays . . ." AE